In our last, we had occasion to speak sharply of that class of our
aristocratic youth known by the name of fast fellows, and it may be
thought that we characterized their foibles rather pointedly, and
tinctured our animadversions with somewhat of undue asperity. This
charge, however, can be made with no ground of reason or justice: the
fact is, we only lashed the follies for which that class of men are
pre-eminent, but left their vices in the shade, in the hope that the
_raw_ we have already established, will shame the fast fellows into a
sense of the proprieties of conduct due to themselves and their station.
The misfortune is, that these fast fellows forget, in the pursuit of
their favourite follies, that the mischief to society begins only with
themselves: that man is naturally a servile, imitative animal; and that
he follows in the track of a great name, as vulgar muttons run at the
heels of a belwether. The poison of fashionable folly runs comparatively
innocuous while it circulates in fashionable veins; but when vulgar
fellows are innoculated with the virus, it becomes a plague, a moral
small-pox, distorting, disfiguring the man's mind, pockpitting his small
modicum of brains, and blinding his mind's eye to the supreme contempt
his awkward vagaries inspire.
The fast fellows rejoice exceedingly in the spread of their servile
imitation of fashionable folly, this gentlemanly profligacy at
second-hand; and perhaps this is the worst trait in their character, for
it is at once malicious and unwise: malicious, because the contemplation
of humanity, degraded by bad example in high station, should rather be a
source of secret shame than of devilish gratification: unwise, because
their example is a discredit to their order, and a danger. To posses
birth, fashion, station, wealth, power, is title enough to envy, and
handle sufficient for scandal. How much stronger becomes that title--how
much longer that handle--when men, enjoying this pre-eminence, enjoy it,
not using, but abusing their good fortune!
We should not have troubled our heads with the fast fellows at all, if
it were not absolutely essential to the full consideration of our
subject, widely to sever the prominent classes of fashionable life, and
to have no excuse for continuing in future to confound them. We have now
done with the fast fellows, and shall like them the more the less we
hear of them.